Dravidian Letters in Tamil Grantha Script Some Notes in Their History of Use Dr. Naga Ganesan ([email protected]) 1.0 Introduction Earlier, in L2/11-011 with the title, Diacritic Marks for Short e & o Vowels (Dravidian and Vedic) in Devanagari (North India) and Grantha (South India), Vedic vowels, short e & o in Devanagari are recommended to be transcribed into Grantha in Unicode using the corresponding letters as in Govt. of India (GoI) proposal. The archaic Dravidian short /e/ & /o/ typically use a “dot” (puLLi) diacritic on long /e/ & /o/ vowels in south India, and this was originally proposed in the Grantha proposal after consultations with epigraphists and Tamil Grantha scholars. Reference: the Table of Dravidian letters in Grantha proposal by Dr. Swaran Lata, Govt. of India letter, pg. 8, L2/11-011 is given: This document is to add some further inputs about the history of Tamil written in Grantha script. Grantha Tamil or Tamil Grantha, by definition, can handle writing both Indo- Aryan (Sanskrit and its derived languages) and Dravidian such as Tamil language. Both Tamil script with explicit virama, and Tamil Grantha script with implicit virama grew up together in their history, that is the reason about 30 letters are very similar between the two scripts. For example, page 37, A. C. Burnell, Elements of South Indian Paleography, 1874. “The origin of this Tamil alphabet is apparent at first sight; it is a brahmanical adaptation of the Grantha letters corresponding to the old VaTTezuttu, from which, however, the last four signs (LLL, LL, RR and NNN) have been retained.” For the co-development of Tamil and Grantha scripts exchanging letter forms is dealt in B. Chhabra, Expansion of Indo-Aryan culture during Pallava rule, 1965, pp. 72-76. Dr. A. Veluppillai explained that Tamil and Tamil Grantha scripts are considered as the same by giving an illustration. In Pandya country, the normal script known as VaTTezuttu was reserved for Tamil language portion of epigraphs, while Tamil names or letters from Tamil script were mixed in the Grantha script portion to write Sanskrit sections of the same inscription. This, according to Prof. Veluppillai, is the solid proof that Tamil and Grantha are considered one and the same script in centuries past, and the reason why 30 or so letters are the same or very near the same between the two scripts even today. As further proof, Asko Parpola (Helsinki) sent a sample where LLLA is used inside Saamaveda (Sanskrit) printed in Tamil Grantha script in 1924 (Section 3.0). Similar examples exist for LLA and NNNA also. For comparative purposes, look into Tamil block in Unicode having added letters, sha (U+0BB6) and similarly Malayalam has new letters, NNNA and TTTA in Unicode 6.0. 2.0 PuLLi diacritic in Unicode Brahmi and in Grantha orthography: Govt. of India proposal on Grantha has a Nukta combining sign at U+1133C which is to help make Grantha letters write English letters, Z, W and F in proper transliteration. Nukta is brand new for Grantha, and not found at all in old books and manuscripts. The puLLi “dot” diacritic has been applied on Grantha letters in print long ago. For example, see the 1900 AD book, Bhoja Charitram available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=XbE_AAAAIAAJ&dq=bhoja+charitram&source=gbs _navlinks_s puLLi dot diacritic on some Grantha letters from the book, Bhoja charitram: (p. xiii) (p. xiv) (p. xvi) Let us take a look at Brahmi encoding in Unicode (L2/07-342, S. Baums and A. Glass). “A special device was introduced for the marking of vowelless consonants, used both for Sanskrit and Tamil. In Sanskrit, this sign is called virāma and is first attested in manuscripts of the first century CE. In Tamil, it is called puLLi and is attested in inscriptions from the second century CE (Mahadevan 2003, p. 198).” (pg. 4). “In the second century BCE, as Brāhmī spread southwards, speakers of Old Tamil became acquainted with it and adapted it to the writing of their own language.” (pg. 7). “PuLLi takes the form of a dot above or in the upper part of the akSara. In addition to this normal virāma function, puLLi is also used with the vowels e and o in order to mark them as short: in contrast to Sanskrit and most Middle-Indo-Aryan dialects, the Dravidian languages have short as well as long e and o phonemes.” In the Brahmi encoding, puLLi function and its shape “dot” to reduce long /e/ and /o/ to short vowels is allowed in Unicode (pg. 8, L2/07-342). This Brahmi script principle is also used to produce short /e/ and /o/ in Grantha code chart (GoI, L2/10-426). PuLLi for short /e/ and /o/ in Grantha is needed for writing without mutilation thousands of words in the Dravidian languages of south India. And also short /e/ & /o/ required while transcribing names like Kennedy, Obama, … in Grantha. Shriramana Sharma in his documents submitted to UTC in 2010 has explained and accepted the need for the short /e/ and /o/ and Govt. of India meeting of Grantha experts has come to the same decision. 3.0 Tamil transliterated in Tamil Grantha script For long, Tamil letters have been added in Brahmi scripts to write Dravidian properly. This is acknowledged in Unicode encoding, for example, Brahmi encoding in Unicode allots separate code points for Tamil/Dravidian letters. In addition to the “vowel reducer” diacritic, Tamil puLLi to generate short /e/ and /o/ vowels in Brahmi in Unicode encoding, S. Baums and A. Glass added the Tamil letters in Brahmi code chart in Unicode (pg. 8-9, L2/07-342): “For the representation of sounds particular to Dravidian, the makers of Old Tamil Brāhmī added four new consonant signs to the repertoire of Brāhmī: LLL, LL, RR and NNN. The second of these, LL, is phonetically identical (a retroflex lateral) to the LL that somewhat later appears in north-Indian Brāhmī for the writing of Sanskrit, and that also occurs in the Bhattiprolu inscriptions. Moreover, both the Tamil Brāhmī and the Bhattiprolu LL are graphically derived from the regular letter l, the former by adding a hook to the lower right of l, the latter by mirroring l horizontally (while the north-Indian LL is derived from the letter DD). Old Tamil, Bhattiprolu and north-Indian LL should therefore all be encoded as 11031. Additional code points are provided for LLL, RR and NNN in the positions 11072 to 11074.” As we can see, similar principles have been employed for the 5 Dravidian/Tamil letters in Grantha chart proposal. Let us now look at some history of writing Tamil in Grantha script documents across the last seven centuries. Tamil has been declared as one Classical language of India few years ago in the Indian parliament. Prof. George L. Hart, University of California, sent in a Letter of recommendation for this, and when two other Dravidian languages, viz., Telugu and Kannada were added to the Classics list by the Govt. of India, Hart wrote some comments as a reaction, published in my weblog: http://nganesan.blogspot.com/2010/09/bhk.html Being a classical language of India, Tamil, like Sanskrit, is also written in several scripts. Apart from Tamil script, Tamil is written in (1) Arabic script, its name being aRabi Tamizh or Tamil Arabic (2) Latin script as Tamil Latin (ISO 15919 standard). BTW, like Some French and German letters used more commonly in English web to denote the exact sounds, as font availability due to Unicode increases, Tamil Latin can be employed at least in the special Dravidian/Tamil letters to denote the retroflex sounds of south India to the more general English readers of the world and, (3) of course, Tamil Grantha script to exactly represent sacred Dravidian/Tamil classics, bhakti texts (Bhakti is a major part of religion of the masses in India, said to have started by Dravida saints 13 centuries ago). Caldwell, Robert (1858/9). "On the substitution of the Roman characters for the Indian characters", Madras Journal of Literature and Science, new series 4:43-71. This early reference started the Tamil transliteration effort into Latin, its evolution can be studied via the British library catalogues of Tamil books published intermittently during the 20th century. Tamil Arabic script has a much longer history than the Tamil Latin transcriptions. Coming to Tamil being written in Grantha script, it is at least 720 years old. Grantha is truly a multi-language script and it can legitimately be called as “Latin” script of south India and south east Asia because it has been applied to write different language families such as Dravidian in history, like Latin script handles many languages now. Here is an early instance of Grantha employed as a multi-language script to transliterate Tamil language. “Curiously enough we find a copper-plate grant containing an inscription having Sanskrit and Tamil sections both written in the Grantha script [11]. The date of the record falls in 1289 AD. The Tamil portion is entirely transliterated in Grantha script following only the written form and not the form of pronunciation. [11] Ep. Ind., XXXVII, pp. 175 ff . ” (pg. 243. “Convertibility of surds and sonants”— historical evidence, K. G. Krishnan - Indo-Iranian Journal, 1972) . After the copper-plate inscription of 1289 AD, the next stage in south India of transliteration of Tamil into Grantha is recorded by the researches of Prof. S. Raju (L2/11-024). Prof. Raju documents his results about Tamil being written in Grantha script in social documents of Palaghat region, Kerala and Justice R.